Explicitation In English-Chinese Translation Of Children's Literature

Children's literature is a window for children to understand the world.It is a kind of entertainment and a miniature society for children,and at the same time,promotes their cognitive and language development.Excellent children's literature can enlighten children's intelligence and guide children to grow in a positive way while children's literature in low quality is just counterproductive.When international communication calls for cultural exchange,it is quite necessary to introduce excellent foreign children's literary.But we should be aware that only when the quality of the translation version is ensured,can the introduction be meaningful,which the current domestic market of children's literary translation fails to.At present,the quality of translations is uneven,and the characteristics of the target readers are not fully taken into consideration.All these factors lead to translations far from satisfying.In the light of the characteristics of the readers,this thesis,taking Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as an example,studies explicitation during English-Chinese translation of children's literature from three aspects: words,sentences and contexts.This thesis takes the relevance theory of Sperber and Wilson as the framework,supplemented by literature research method to collect relevant literature.The theory holds that communication is an ostensive-inferential process during which the listener understands speaker's speech through cognitive reasoning,and the reasoning process is ensured by speaker's proper explicitation and also lister's assumption.This process requires listener to retrieve information in storage to form a context of reasoning,which costs mental effort.Therefore,it's quite understandable that all of communication is about achieving maximum contextual effects at minimum cognitive efforts.Translation,as a kind of communication,is also the case.This thesis attempts to make a comparative study between the translation version of Zhao Yuanren and that of Leng Shan of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from the perspective of relevance theory.Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted in terms of phonetic meaning,graphemic meaning,cultural meaning of words,the proportion of verbs and figure of speech in sentences,characterization as well as writer's intentions in context to find out the similarities and differences in dealing with explicitation.In this way,general tendency of explicitation and corresponding translating strategies are expected to be found out.This study found that in in children's literature translation,explicitation is quite necessary.At the level of words,phonetic meanings,graphemic meanings,and cultural meanings should be made explicit by blending,transliterating,or transposing.At the level of sentence,translators should make the verbs and figures of speech explicit for the sake of readers' less mental efforts and more contextual effects.Conversing is a frequently used strategy to manifest verbs.As for figures of speech,the effects of consonance can be made explicit by restituting;the meanings of metaphors and similes can be made more explicit through substituting;extending is a good way to translate onomatopoeia in achieving the optimal relevance for readers.At the contextual level,attention should be paid to the explicitation of correct ideological norms and values.Translators should manifest positive information in an explicit way,especially the educational knowledge.At the same time,translators should try to make more explicit the personality of characters through restituting,which will save readers' efforts to understand the development of plot.